Carl Sargeant's death was a tragedy. But women must keep speaking out

They really started something, the women who made those first allegations against Harvey Weinstein. It remains to be seen quite how big the thing they started will become. But in Britain, wherever matters are headed, a pause for thought has been created and in the most terrible of ways. On Tuesday, Welsh Labour's Carl Sargeant killed himself. Allegations of sexual misconduct had recently been made against him.
In the wake of those allegations, from three women, Sargeant had been sacked from his cabinet post, and suspended from the Welsh assembly while an investigation took place. Sargeant's situation was made public, although no details of the allegations were given to Sargeant himself. Carwyn Jones, the Welsh first minister, is now under fire because of the way he handled the complaints. In a statement, Jones has emphasised that he did things "by the book".
Sargeant's grieving family say that the Labour party did not give Sargeant the pastoral care that he needed, after he had been placed under so much strain. In the light of events, this criticism seems unanswerable. I don't think it's only the Labour party that needs to learn lessons, though. People need to be able to make allegations of sexual misconduct without fear. Conversely, mere allegations should not be feared so greatly that people's lives are destroyed by them. Especially at this time, when the societal rules about permissible behaviour are being painfully redrawn.
It is not appropriate to speculate about this particular case. But more generally, the tenor of debate in the last few weeks has been aggressive. The vast number and great seriousness of the allegations against Weinstein encouraged many more women to speak out about their own experiences of sexual attack and harassment. Women in British theatre spoke out. Women in Westminster spoke out. Many women spoke out, and some men.
Crucially, however, and even in the case of Weinstein, there were those who asked what women expected when they agreed to a meeting in a hotel room. The first allegations against Kevin Spacey had barely fallen from his initial accuser's lips before one columnist fumed that the actor was being punished on the strength of mere gossip. Women who spoke of lunges from politicians were told that they ought to be better at parrying lunges. Women who described hands on knees were told they had probably been assaulted by tablecloths. The threat of a punch on the nose was doughtily touted as the post-feminism woman's version of the slap in the face.
Soon, it was men who were in anguish about their victimhood. Charles Moore, in the Telegraph, worried that women were now on top and fretted about whether they would share power with men or just "crush us". Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, in a spectacular reversal of reality, vouchsafed that the "squawking women" would end up in niqabs if they carried on the way they were. Brendan O'Neill abandoned his attempts to prime Spacey for martyrdom, and started blathering on about how the witches were doing the witch-hunting now. Or something.
Some commentators, David Goodhart chief among them, even started to mansplain that it was only the women of the metropolitan elites who were bothered about sexual harassment. Out in the boonies, apparently, women are longing for Goodhart to chase them round a desk.
But of course the women of the metropolitan elite would be the ones to complain first, Mr Goodhart, because we are the ones - pretty much by definition - with enough power to say what we don't like and ask (ask!) for it to stop. Anyway, when I was a working-class schoolgirl in Motherwell, guess what? I didn't like being sexually harassed any more than I do now. And I was - a lot.
All women are asking for is for men to treat us as their equals, their friends and their trusted allies. We don't want our bodies to be treated like touchscreen appliances that men swipe or swipe at in order to see what happens next. Equality, friendship and trust foster intimacy, that wonderful connection when two people feel so in tune with each other that physical sharing and sexual unity are the natural, inevitable and blissfully right conclusion.
Why are so many men so certain that this is not something they can have, that they settle for tweaking a boob on the off-chance instead - or worse, so much worse, building an empire in which they can wreak vengeance on the women they cannot be intimate with by sexually controlling and humiliating them instead? And why are so many men so keen, so disgustingly keen, to keep things that way?
It doesn't need to be so fraught. Women are willing to draw a line under the past and start again, in a healthier, more respectful culture. But so many powerful people resist the idea that women really don't enjoy capricious, random passes. It's those stubborn people who create an environment in which the fight to establish the bodily autonomy of women gets nasty. In that toxic atmosphere, no one's interests, whether victim or accused, are best served.